Meadow at Giverny

For a few years before the First World War this meadow belonged to one of the strangest collectors in Paris. Alexandre Berthier, Prince of Wagram, a descendant of Napoleon's marshal, came into a vast fortune at 21 and between 1905 and 1907 bought more than 400 works of art, many of which stayed in dealers' storerooms or were resold almost at once. Debts followed. In April 1914 he sold this canvas to Durand-Ruel, and in 1916 the firm's New York branch sold it to Hannah Marcy Edwards of Boston. The prince died in the fighting in May 1918. The painting itself, from 1886, offers nothing to fix the eye on at first, no figure and no building, only horizontal bands of bright colour on a canvas a little taller than it is wide. The Museum of Fine Arts reads it as a painting of loneliness. One tree at the back pulls away from its neighbours and stands up on its own against the sky.